Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D. is a materials physicist, self-owned, a benevolent and tolerant Objectivist, a husband and father, the owner of a materials analysis laboratory, and a thinking individualist. The critical battle of our day is the conflict between the individual and the state. We must be ever vigilant and constant defenders of the equal sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the personal pursuit of happiness.

Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

12 December 2015

The Supreme Court just heard a case on Tuesday, Evenwel v. Abbott, over whether state legislative districts must equalize the number of voters or the number of people. The particular state in this case is Texas, where districts are apportioned by number of people and where the number of voters per district then differs greatly in some cases.

One person, one vote sounds nice -- until you give it some thought. Of course children are persons, but we exclude them from voting. Non-citizens are also not supposed to vote, though many do in some districts, especially those controlled by the Democratic Party. Many people though eligible to become voters do not register to vote. Many people who are registered to vote skip many or some elections. There simply is no sense in which one person gets one vote and one share of representation. There is no feasible way to achieve any such outcome in the future.

The Constitution originally handled the problem this way:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and Excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Consequently, districts for the House of Representatives were equalized for the total number of people, excluding untaxed Indians and two-fifths of slaves. The free Persons included non-citizens. The idea at the time was that those men eligible to vote would represent all men with insufficient property to vote, children, women, non-citizens, those bound to service for a term of years, and all slaves.

The 14th Amendment changed the apportionment for the House Districts by only excluding Indians not taxed. It went on to punish states that denied the right to vote to male citizens of 21 years of age or older by reducing the House representation in proportion to their numbers in ratio to the total number of male citizens 21 years of age and older. The idea was still clearly that male citizens of 21 years or older would represent all women and all non-citizens.

But how should the House Districts properly be set up? By extension, how should state legislative districts be set up? Is it reasonable to assume that those who vote are trying and able to represent the good of those who cannot or will not vote when they cast their vote? These are substantive questions. It is not unreasonable for fairly reasonable people to disagree on the answers.

At the time the 14th Amendment was written, it was considered that House Districts should be apportioned in accordance with the number of voters or eligible voters. That idea was shot down immediately when Representative James Blaine, Republican of Maine, examined the census data and found that since the ratio of men to women was much higher in Western states than in the Eastern states, the Eastern states would lose massive representation if it were based on the number of voters or eligible voters. Women could not vote, but they were valuable for inflating the numbers of persons for representation, much as slaves had been in the South in the past.

It is now easy for all citizens of age to vote. Despite this, in many areas very low fractions of the citizens chose to vote. They are either not sufficiently interested or they are so infused with a sense of futility that they see no point in voting. Should uninterested people or those so infused with a sense of doom and futility be given representation that they will not use?

In most cases, such uninterested or futility-bound voters especially occupy highly Democrat districts. So many Progressive Elitist Democrats believe such non-participating voters or potential voters should be represented because they, the Progressive Elitists, will cast their votes in the interest of the apathetic or doomed-in-futility persons. Yet these same Progressive Elitists have long claimed to be doing this, especially to minimize economic inequality. Nonetheless, the Congressional Districts with the worst economic inequality are almost exclusively Democratic and have been for decades. Clearly, the Progressive Elitist voters, who do vote in high percentages, either do not actually vote to reduce economic inequality or they do so with a complete misunderstanding of the consequences of their votes. They are clearly horrible at representing the interests of the less educated and less inclined to vote people in their districts.

In general, people who vote either vote their own interest or they vote for the interests of others without actually understanding their interests. Let us be realists and recognize the facts and human nature. People barely able to motivate themselves to vote rarely have any understanding of the legitimate role of government, the important political issues of the time, the principles of the candidates, and the manner in which new laws and regulations will affect our futures. In the era of
Big Government these issues are often much more complex than they were in the past in America.

We should also note that it is clear that people are not good at representing the interests of children. We see this in the miserable public education system we have, in the huge national debt, in the terrible future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, and the complete disregard for the effect of compounded economic growth rates on the standard of living of Americans 30 or 40 years from now. Few voters weigh the future enough to look to future outcomes. Consequently, they are nearly worthless as representatives of the interests of today's children.

House districts, both federal and state, should simply be apportioned on the basis of the number of voters in the last several elections, assuming they do not exceed the number of eligible voters as they do in some Democrat districts. This apportions representation according to the numbers of citizens of age to vote who actually have an interest in government. Yes, many of them will not understand the issues and the consequences of their votes either, but this is the one form in which One Person, One Vote is actually achievable in the form of One Voter, One Vote.

Adding to the weight on political outcomes of those districts with higher voter turn-out is likely to raise the quality of the People's Voice about as high as one can accomplish by any means except an improved education system or other educational efforts. If the reward in political outcomes is greater for those who already care enough to vote, perhaps they will make a greater effort in the future to think about their votes. These more thoughtful voters then may even realize a bit greater responsibility not to do harm to others, including those others who do not care to vote. But realistically, one will be giving a greater voting weight to those who are voting for the interests of those they know best, themselves and perhaps their immediate family and friends. That is not a bad thing. Most great wrongs are done when people vote or act for others they do not even know, or when they pretend to do so.

How might one determine the number of voters for these district apportionment purposes? How about the last four elections in the previous decade with re-apportionment occurring once a decade? It would be nice if one could just make this the last four elections, but the re-districting effort and battles would be too much. As for why four elections, the fluctuations in voter turn-out are great, especially the differences between Presidential elections and those when voting on the President does not occur. The last four elections will include two presidential and two non-presidential elections. It will include elections when no vote was up in the state for Senator in Congress. It is a good number to average out, though it may slightly lag overall population shifts. I would gladly live with that population shift lag for the many benefits of One Voter, One Vote, One Share of Representation.

As for state legislative districts, a variety of formulas are fairly reasonable and determining what formula to use should be left up to the states. Only very unreasonable state decisions should be corrected by the Supreme Court. Among the unreasonable apportionments would be those that count non-citizens. Perhaps counting citizen children should also be considered unreasonable, though I am less adamant about this than about the non-citizen count.

Which brings up the need to also tackle the problem of ineligible voters casting ballots as another aspect of the voter representation problem.

08 December 2015

The No Fly List is an often incompetently compiled list which does not follow the judicial procedures that are a necessary protection of individual rights. It denies individuals the right to travel by air with the false claim that one does not have a right to travel by air. It is claimed that travel is just a privilege which government can revoke at its whim.

This is not true. The right to travel is a very fundamental right. Just as no one has the obligation to provide us with happiness, no one is obliged to enable our travel. But, no one is justified in preventing our traveling with the use of force or the threat of force so long as we do so without hurting anyone else. Before one's right to travel can be abridged, there must be a judicial determination that one has a history of initiating the use of force or that one has plans to do so.

The right to bear arms is an explicitly guaranteed right in our Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment to the Constitution specifically recognizes this right to own arms. Obama's call to prevent the sale of arms and the possession of arms to those on the No Fly List is highly irrational. I am sure it seems to make sense to many Americans, but it does not.

Only those who have established felony histories can be denied their Second Amendment right to bear arms. This means those who are deprived of their gun rights have been first evaluated by our judiciary as a reasonable threat to others should they be allowed to own a gun. But note what Obama is doing to undermine this basic right guaranteed in our Bill of Rights: He is denying this right on the basis of a list made in denial of a travel right without a proper judicial review of those denied this right. In his own terms, he is using the revocation of what he calls a privilege to justify the revocation of an individual right protected in our Bill of Rights. The downgrade of our travel rights is being used as a basis to downgrade a right protected in our Constitution.

Even in the Articles of Confederation, the right to travel from one state to another was recognized. Many court cases decided under the Constitution have also recognized this right to travel. Yet since 9/11, this right has been denied, especially in air travel. Now we see once again how the violation of one right is used to justify the violation of another individual right.

In his speech Sunday night, Obama claimed that those who use violence as a means to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam. Since Islam is essentially a religion that obligates its believers to emulate Mohammad's life practices and Mohammad used violence and terror to advance his religion, it is nonsense to claim that people who believe they are using violence and terror to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam. In the context of Islam, they are not radical, however radical they are as human beings.

Yes, most people who think of themselves as Muslims are not themselves violent in their practice of the religion. Many are good people. Nonetheless, those of us who are not practicing Islam have often observed that far too few Muslims are openly critical of those who use violence or terror to advance the religion. Well, there is a very logical reason why Muslims do not offer such criticism as much as good people should. They cannot criticize the present-day advocates of violence against non-Muslims without making an implied criticism of Mohammad himself for using violence and terror to spread his religion. They must be silent. Their silence is in some part due to fear, but it is also due to the fundamental beliefs of the religion itself. Many of those Muslims who do not themselves use force to make others observe Islam make "charitable" contributions to organizations that advocate or actually use force for that purpose.

Contrary to Obama's claim that we owe Muslims all of the rights we usually allow people under the freedom of religion, we do not owe this religious freedom to any religion that advocates the use of force to make others practice that religion. Freedom of religion, as with all freedom of conscience, has to have a foundation in the prohibition of the use of force against others as a means to practice the religion. Given that prohibition of force, we can and should allow others their freedom of conscience, even as we claim the exercise of our own freedom of conscience.

Given that Islam is in essence the emulation of Mohammad, we can very reasonably ask if Mohammad were alive today, would we allow him to enter the United States? I would not allow him in. He is much too dangerous, too violent, and too committed to terrorism. Neither would I allow those who followed his commands to commit violence against non-believers to enter the U.S. In doing so, I would not be in violation of anyone's legitimate claim of freedom of religion. I would be protecting most Americans from violence.

13 November 2015

With the international conference on Man-Induced Global Warming coming up soon in Paris, there is a petition circulating to support government efforts to suppress the use of inexpensive and reliable fossil fuels. Here is the petition with my comments in blue added to it:

World leaders are coming together this year for climate talks in Paris. Their decisions affect all of us. Darned, pesky nuisances these interfering world leaders are. With most of the nations of the world having weak economies and too little respect for individual rights, these leaders are looking for ways to divert our attention from the many ways they get in our way, by getting in our way in the name of a scare based on a failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.

Climate change is dramatically changing the world we love. It’s putting our homes, our land and our food at risk. For nearly a billion people in poverty, more extreme weather and more disasters mean more hunger. Climate has always changed. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. But, the world climate has actually been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years and there is evidence that that has yet changed. Man minimizes the consequences of climate change by using such resources as fossil fuels to make his home comfortable, manufacture products, and travel about to do productive work and transport his production to markets where people live better because of those products. These private sector activities help us all to cope with the ancient vagaries of weather and climate.

Make 2015 the year leaders put the world’s most vulnerable people first in the battle against climate change. So let them have the least expensive energy for transportation, light, and heat. They will only become more vulnerable with skyrocketing energy prices, such as those advocated by Obama, his chief science advisor Holdren, and his Secr. of Energy.

If governments and big businesses are serious about fighting poverty, we need heads of state to make decisions in Paris that show support for the people whose lives and livelihoods are most at risk. These leaders have the power to start taking bold action on emissions, and to start to fix the damage that’s already been done. Only there is no evidence that any damage has been done. Rising CO2 concentrations do seem to be making plants grow better, which is only bad to these people because they think there are too many people on Earth and some of these Progressive Elitists want to see many of the poor die, because they believe man is the enemy of nature. Their war to save nature is their war against man.

Millions of people across the world are already doing incredible things to protect the world we love. The fight against climate change won’t end this year but together we can win some important battles. People in the most advanced societies that use the most fossil fuels are the ones who do the most to protect the world we love.

Show our governments and big business that they’ve got to take urgent action to tackle climate change, and stand with those hit first and worst by extreme weather and disasters. Yes, tell them to leave private companies alone, so they can concentration on delivering inexpensive energy which is available when people need it.

Make 2015 the year leaders stand with those hardest hit by climate change. Yes, convince these leaders to stop meddling with our energy.

World leaders are playing mercilessly on the ignorance of the people with their tireless media, education, and political campaigns to convince them that any weather change is a fundamental threat to their existence and well-being caused by those bad human beings. What I see are bad politicians, bad educators, and misleading and wrongheaded media.

03 November 2015

Our own Anderson Materials Evaluation (AME) chemist Dr. Kevin Wepasnick guided a Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) investigation of the properties of a helium-pressurized beer in an article entitled Helium Beer, From Prank to Tank
in its 2 November 2015 issue written by Craig Bettenhausen. C&EN
is a publication of the American Chemical Society. Kevin brewed a
5-gallon batch of a cream stout beer for C&EN over a two-week
fermentation period at Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. with writers
from C&EN visiting our laboratory at the start and the end of the
process. He used a kegging process, but instead of pressurizing the keg
with carbon dioxide, he pressurized it with helium. The experiment was
set up to test the claims that drinking a helium-pressurized beer would
cause the drinker to speak with a high-pitched voice, as demonstrated
in some on-line videos.

Scientifically, issues are to
be expected. Foremost is the difference between a polar molecule with
excellent solvent properties such as carbon dioxide and the inert gas
helium. Carbon dioxide has a solubility in water of 1.7 g/kg, while
helium has a solubility of merely 0.0015 g/kg in water! It would be a
challenge to dissolve enough helium in a beer to turn a drinker's voice
squeaky! Kevin pressurized the keg at 50 psi in a chilled keg, which is
a much higher pressure than is used with carbon dioxide, and he held it
at this pressure for five days.

The resulting beer had
an excellent head of very fine bubbles, which it maintained as the
visiting three writers from C&EN and the scientists of Anderson
Materials Evaluation, Lorrie, Kevin, and Charles, sampled the beer at
our laboratory. Because the beer had little carbonic acid in it, it was
a mellow beer. The alcohol by volume was measured to be 6.2%, so it
had a kick. Yet, the beer was definitely flat and no one developed a
high-pitched voice. The Internet videos claiming such a result are
fabricated! Can you imagine that?

Well,
yes, thinking as a scientist, the more than a thousand times lower
solubility of inert helium in water compared to the highly polar carbon dioxide
molecule, told us those videos were faked prior to doing the
experiment. Nonetheless, the experiment was fun for all, which is more the natural state of science than is the gloom and doom associated with much environmental science of our times.

The Antarctic ice sheet had net gains in ice of 112 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2001.

Antarctic ice from 2003 to 2008 had a net gain of 82 billion tons per year.

Extra snowfall in East Antarctica began about 10,000 years ago as the Earth warmed after the last Ice Age and this snowfall thickened the East Antarctic and the interior regions of the West Antarctic by 1.7 cm/year. This accumulation over vast expanses more than offsets the melting of ice on the West Antarctic peninsula which gets so much publicity.

The increased ice in Antarctica is now acting to reduce sea levels by 0.23 mm/year.

One of the more interesting observations on this data is that the global warming due to the end of the last Ice Age caused more snowfall in Antarctica, which serves to counterbalance the rise in sea level due to the thermal expansion of water in a warmer world. This is one of many ways in which the Earth moderates climate changes.

The findings of this study were the result of more accurate measurements of the small thickening of the ice in most of Antarctica from satellite measurements, with the exception of the ice core investigations by others that indicated the increase in snowfall beginning 10,000 years ago. It would not be surprising if the application of these satellite analysis methods to Greenland were to find that previous claims of large ice losses there were also wrong. It is easy to observe large glaciers calving into the ocean while missing the slow increases of ice thickness over much larger areas.

31 October 2015

Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to their adjustments of the temperature record. These adjustments were recently used to remove all evidence of the pause in surface temperatures from 1998 to 2013 and replace that pause with a temperature surge. NOAA refused to hand the documents on the adjustments over, in direct violation of law. Smith's committee wants to know why.

According to Rep. Smith:

The
American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data
to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to
reveal how those decisions were made.

As a recent editorial in Investors Business Daily says:

Taxpayers
pay for this research, which is being used to justify massive new
federal spending and regulation. They deserve to know what NOAA and
other federal agencies are doing — and whether they're being honest or
serving an unspoken extreme political agenda.

Indeed, it is way past time that the Obama administration should be stopped from exaggerating claims of catastrophic man-made global warming simply by manipulating the data to systematically lower past temperatures and to raise recent temperatures. NOAA and NASA GISS have both long been engaged in this fraud and have not been held responsible for their corruption of science and their lawless activities. These activities have then fed the data mill that the Obama EPA has used to claim that CO2 is a terrible pollutant. It is no such thing. It is in fact absolutely necessary for life on Earth by virtue of the need of plants for it and our need of plants. It is the use of CO2 by plants that produces the oxygen in the atmosphere that animals, including man, require. Yet the Obama EPA has the gall to call this life-essential molecule a pollutant based on the fudging of data by NOAA and NASA GISS!

Thanks primarily to government e-mails and information obtained by Judicial Watch, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced a resolution this week to impeach the IRS commissioner for "high crimes and
misdemeanors." IRS Commissioner Koskinen has obstructed justice while protecting the criminal actions of Lois Lerner, whom the Obama Justice Department has just refused to prosecute even as the investigation into her and other IRS managers' activities is still underway.

Representative Chaffetz has based his call for impeachment of the IRS Commissioner on these points:•
He failed to comply with a subpoena resulting in destruction of key
evidence. Commissioner Koskinen failed to locate and preserve IRS
records in accordance with a congressional subpoena and an internal
preservation order. The IRS erased 422 backup tapes containing as many
as 24,000 of Lois Lerner's emails - key pieces of evidence that were
destroyed on Koskinen's watch.

• He failed to testify truthfully
and provided false and misleading information. Commissioner Koskinen
testified the IRS turned over all emails relevant to the congressional
investigation, including all of Ms. Lerner's emails. When the agency
determined Ms. Lerner's emails were missing, Commissioner Koskinen
testified the emails were unrecoverable. These statements were false.

•
He failed to notify Congress that key evidence was missing. The IRS knew
Lois Lerner's emails were missing in February 2014. In fact, they were
not missing; the IRS destroyed the emails on March 4, 2014. The IRS did
not notify Congress the emails were missing until June 2014 - four
months later, and well after the White House and the Treasury Department
were notified.

Meanwhile, Obama claims that there is not a smidgen of evidence of wrong-doing in his IRS or his Department of Justice.

17 October 2015

This is a thought experiment. The idea is to make a
simple test of the plausibility or even possibility of the claim of the catastrophic man-made or
anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis that the increase from about 300
ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last 120
years or so has caused a surface temperature increase of 1°C or 1K.

Now I know that this is a concept very much ignored by the
advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming, but I am going to assume
that the Law of Conservation of Energy, which they have not explicitly refuted,
still holds.I have a high level of
confidence in this law of physics.

Let us start out with the simplifying assumption that every
air molecule has the same heat capacity at constant pressure.This means that the same amount of heat is
required to raise the temperature of each kind of molecule by 1K.We will discuss the correction for this
below. I will also make the simplifying assumption that the carbon dioxide molecules are heated fully to the necessary temperature and then dumped into the air whose temperature is raised by 1 K upon reaching equilibrium. The limitations on this assumption will also be examined later.

If the addition of 100 molecules of CO2 to the
prior 300 molecules/ 1 million air molecules has caused all air molecules near
the surface of the Earth to have a 1K temperature increase, then given
Conservation of Energy, each of the CO2 molecules has to gain an
additional temperature of Ta which is transferred by collisions to all the other gas molecules until they are all at an equilibrium temperature 1K higher than the air had previously been. Ta is given by:

1,000,000 (1K) = 400 Ta

Ta = 2500
K,

because of the proportional relationship of heat, a form of
energy, to the temperature of the gas molecules.

Now let us allow for the fact that the heat capacities per
mole at constant pressure of the molecules in air are not equal.We want the values per mole because that
gives them for equal numbers of molecules, while the per gram values of heat
capacity do not.We have for each gas heat
capacity values of:

N2, 29.12 J/K mol.

O2, 29.38 J/K mol.

Ar, 20.79 J/K mol.

H2O, 28.03 J/K mol.

CO2, 36.94 J/K mol.

Air, 29.07 J/K mol.

We discover now that a 1 K increase in the temperature of a molecule
of CO2 gives it more additional energy than the average air
molecule needs to raise its temperature by 1K.So, the temperature per CO2 molecule that we calculated above
will not need to be quite so large.The
required temperature Ta will only be:

Ta = (2500
K) / (36.94 / 29.07)

Ta = 1967
K

Now, recall that this is only the additional temperature of
each CO2 molecule required to cause a 1K temperature increase spread
evenly over every air molecule in equilibrium at the Earth’s surface.

The same infra-red absorbing properties
claimed to give CO2 molecules this amazing power, would also be
acting in an atmosphere with a mere 100 ppm of CO2.In fact, each additional 100 ppm of CO2 has a diminishing
effect on heating other gases according to the proposed mechanism for such
heating.The mean free path length for
each infra-red absorption event by a molecule of CO2 becomes exponentially shorter
and shorter as more CO2 molecules are added.The size of the effect for additional
molecules becomes less and less.Consequently, the first 100 ppm of CO2 molecules would heat the air by more than 1K given that 400 ppm of CO2
molecules heat it by 1K upon the increase in concentration from 300 ppm to 400 ppm. Note that this means that the first 100 ppm of molecules of CO2 would have to achieve a temperature more than four times 1976 K or 7868 K.

The further increase in the temperature upon
going from 100 ppm to 200 ppm would also be greater than that for going from
300 ppm to 400 ppm, as would be the temperature increase on going from 200 ppm
to 300 ppm.Each concentration increase
of 100 ppm would cause a smaller temperature increase than the previous one
did. But upon arriving at 200 ppm concentration of carbon dioxide, there are half as many molecules of it as one has upon arriving at 400 ppm of CO2, so each molecule has to be twice as hot. Upon arriving at 300 ppm from 200 ppm, each molecule has to be 4/3rds as hot as it did at 400 ppm.

So let us put together the effect that the wonder molecule of CO2 has had on heating the Earth's surface temperature to date, we calculate the additional minimal temperature each CO2 molecule must have to be to be consistent with the catastrophic AGW claim:

0 to 100 ppm: Ta > 4(1976 K) = 7868 K

100 to 200 ppm: Ta > 2(1976 K) = 3952 K

200 to 300 ppm: Ta > (4/3)(1976 K) = 2635 K

300 to 400 ppm: Ta = 1976 K

We can now calculate the cumulative effect of CO2 molecules given that we have very conservative lower limit values for the heating of the atmosphere provided by CO2 molecules above. The heating due to the miracle molecule at lower concentrations has not gone away. The energy being dumped into the atmosphere is still there, though it is now shared by a larger number of CO2 molecules. Let Tt be the cumulative necessary temperature of our present 400 ppm of carbon dioxide to provide this total base of energy. Invoking Energy Conservation once again, we must conservatively have:

400 Tt > 100 (7868 K) + 200 (3952 K) + 300 (2635 K) + 400 (1976 K)

Tt > 7895 K

Consequently, the temperature
required per CO2 molecule to be transferred to all air molecules by
collisions to establish an equilibrium temperature based on the claims of the advocates of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is substantially
greater than 7895 K.

This required temperature per CO2 molecule is
then substantially greater than 7895 K or 7622°C.The sun is the source of this energy and its
surface temperature is only 5778K or 5505°C.A cooler body cannot heat another body to a temperature greater than its
own temperature.The highest temperature
anything could be raised to on Earth by solar radiation is further diminished
by the distance of the Earth from the sun and the fact that radiation emitted
by the Earth is mostly directed at temperatures in space of about 4K.

There is, of course, another problem. The carbon dioxide molecules would cease to be molecules long before they could reach these hypothetical temperatures. The very collisions that spread the heat from the infra-red active molecules to nitrogen and oxygen molecules would be so energetic that carbon dioxide molecules upon collision would be ionized and destroyed. The unfortunate molecules struck so violently would be ionized. You cannot imagine how bad the ozone problem would be as a result of the ionization of the oxygen molecules in the air!

If the claimed CO2 heating effect were even a small fraction of what is being claimed, then there might be a large fraction of carbon dioxide, water, and methane molecules flying about in the air at velocities much greater than those of the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution. However, that distribution is a fairly accurate description of actual air molecule velocity distributions and it has been tested for many decades. So why do we see no substantial such violation of the Maxwell-Boltzmann equation for the velocity of gas molecules?

It might be due to a combination of a minimal temperature increase in the molecule for each absorption event and a rapid collision rate preventing the accumulation of energy from more than one such absorption event in the molecule. Almost every time a carbon dioxide molecule absorbs an infra-red photon emitted by the Earth's surface, that molecule might commonly have several collisions with other air molecules, losing that absorbed energy. There is very good reason to believe this is the case that the energy gained by one absorption event is quickly lost in large part by collisions with other molecules. Only occasionally does the absorbed infra-red energy get re-emitted as an infra-red photon before it has a collision. So most infra-red active gas molecules are in equilibrium or nearly so with the other gases in the air surrounding them. In other words, the number of absorption events is actually rather small for a given molecule and it does not build up very great amounts of energy to transfer to the non-infra-red active gas molecules of the air.

The primary infra-red wavelength emitted by the surface of the Earth which is absorbed by carbon dioxide molecules is the 15 micron wavelength. This is the equivalent of a photon with an energy of 0.0827 eV or 1.325 x 10-20 J.
Recall that the heat capacity of carbon dioxide at constant pressure is 36.94 J/K mol. There are 6.023 x 1023 (Avogadro's Number) carbon dioxide molecules in a mole, so we can divide the heat capacity per mole by Avogadro's number to find the heat capacity of a single molecule of carbon dioxide. The heat capacity of a single molecule is then 6.135 x 10-23 J/K. The absorption of one 15 micron infra-red photon by one carbon dioxide atom would then raise its temperature by

(1.325 x 10-20 J) / (6.135 x 10-23 J/K) = 216.0 K

So while the frequency of collisions with other molecules may prevent the accumulation of energy in the carbon dioxide molecule at multiples of the single absorption event energy increase, even a single energy absorption event does raise the velocity of a carbon dioxide molecule a great deal. The scale of the claimed catastrophic AGW effect requires each carbon dioxide molecule to transfer the heat equivalent of at least a 7895 K molecule to the air around it. This is 36.55 absorptions of a 15 micron photon per molecule to be transferred by collisions. Somewhat more absorption events are required to accommodate the lower probability that the energy will be given up in the emission of another photon.

The Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution curve is well-known for an ideal gas and it has been well confirmed by experiment. The number of higher velocity carbon dioxide molecules due to the absorption of infra-red radiation emitted from the Earth's surface and their time duration in the excited state should be a measurable parameter that can be used to test the claims of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis. If the advocates of that hypothesis, foremost being the U.S. government, were serious about determining its validity, these measurements would have been performed. What is more, those measurements would be known and discussed as a function of altitude. The fact that little attention has been devoted to such issues is a warning flag that the U.S. government and other advocates of this hypothesis are not serious about wanting it to be tested.

So, we have performed a simple thought experiment based on
what we are told is the central fact of the catastrophic man-made global
warming hypothesis and found that the hypothesis does not require an impossible
effect from this point of view, however a hoot it at first appeared by the first part of the argument above. However, the basic parameters that would define the effect should have long since been measured to define the basic physics. Discussions of the mean free path of infra-red radiation in the atmosphere at various altitudes should be common. It should be common knowledge what fraction of the carbon dioxide molecules are in an excited state at any given moment.

I have made several other arguments that do explain why the physics behind catastrophic AGW is wrong. It is in fact very wrong, but one has to develop other arguments than the one above to show that to be the case using readily available data. It is a shame that the data discussed above is not readily available.

Substantial re-writes were made on 18 and 19 October 2015 of this post. A serious error due to an unreliable energy converter on-line existed in the 18 October version and is corrected in the 19 October version.

11 October 2015

I am reading Six Frigates -- The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy by Ian W. Toll. After the War of Independence, the United States had no navy until the Quasi War with the French under the John Adams administration caused the government to re-establish the U.S. Navy. In the Quasi War with the French, the revolutionary government in France was raiding American ships at sea and confiscating them and their cargoes. The French were trying to do this on the sly, because the Americans traded with their enemies, especially Great Britain. This confiscation of American ships was a rather profitable business for French privateers and even the French navy.

Congress authorized the building of six naval frigates of a size larger than those of the common British plan for naval frigates. Four were to be 44-gun frigates and two were 36-gun frigates. This was viewed as a very expensive venture, but shipping losses at sea were very high. Not only were the French preying on the thousands of American ships involved in international trade, but so were the Barbary Pirates of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco. These original U.S. Navy frigates were the United States, President, Congress, Constitution, Constellation, and Chesapeake. The USS Constellation fought and captured the French frigate L'Insurgente in the Caribbean on 9 February 1799 which had earlier captured American ships. Napoleon took over the French government in a coup and decided to end the conflict with the United States shortly before Jefferson became President in 1801. Jefferson would very soon find it necessary to deal with the Barbary Pirates.

While this is interesting history, especially for me since my father was a career naval officer, this paragraph about Jefferson's commitment to frugal and limited government caught my attention:

In his first inaugural, Jefferson promised "a wise and frugal Government, which ... shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." In private letters, he made the point more sharply: the Republicans would "reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it." Using presidential authority whenever congressional authorization was not needed, Jefferson and his cabinet simply dismissed federal officeholders they considered superfluous. The State Department closed all foreign embassies except those in Madrid, Paris, and London. The Treasury Department's internal revenue inspectors were fired en masse. "We are hunting out and abolishing multitudes of useless offices," Jefferson told his son-in-law in June; "striking off jobs, etc., etc." The magnitude of federal waste they were finding, he told James Monroe, was even greater than the Republicans had expected: "agencies upon agencies in every part of the earth, and for the most useless or mischievous purposes, and all of these opening doors for fraud and embezzlement far beyond the ostensible profits of the agency. These are things of the existence of which no man dreamt, and we are lopping them down silently to make as little noise as possible."

Firing government employees en masse, driving away vultures by spending less, abolishing whole useless offices and agencies dedicated to useless or mischievous purposes with doors open to fraud and embezzlement, and lopping them down silently were Jefferson's purpose to provide a wise and frugal government. Yet today, we are faced with such problems of overblown government as would surely cause Jefferson apoplexy. We very much need a President with a Jeffersonian commitment to wise and frugal government. But anyone with but a fraction of such a commitment today is considered far to radical, an extremist of the right, no matter how wise such a commitment to frugal and limited government is and no matter how federal spending lures special interests to mischievous purposes and fraudulent claims of public benefit.

27 September 2015

The claim that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to catastrophic warming is based on the UN IPCC claim that back-radiation from carbon dioxide absorption of infra-red radiation warms the Earth's surface. This results in increased water vapor in the atmosphere and that causes an even greater increase in the temperature than did the increased carbon dioxide. Even the gigantically exaggerated warming by the carbon dioxide back-radiation effect (see here and here) requires the proponents of this alarmist hypothesis to conjure up a much stronger positive feedback warming due to increased water vapor in order to create anything even remotely "catastrophic."

It has very long been known that higher humidity causes a reduction in the atmospheric lapse rate (the temperature gradient) and therefore a reduction in the surface temperature. There is also a strong cooling of surfaces when water evaporates due to the very high latent heat of evaporation of water. These are facts that have long been well-known, but which are greatly played down by the proponents of the wild and woolly scare story of catastrophic man-made global warming or AGW. These are certainly very strong negative feedbacks to any warming of the Earth's surface due to any cause, whether increased solar radiation or a hypothetical increase in back-radiation due to increased carbon dioxide.

But what is the effect of clouds formed by increased water vapor due to a hypothetical warming of the surface due to increased carbon dioxide or due to any actual warming? Magnus Cederlof examined the CERES satellite cloud cover data to see how it correlates with the yearly variation in global irradiance. He also examined the separate data sets for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The data he presents is very informative, though he presents it in an article with a number of serious errors in it. One of the more serious errors is his claim that his data provides strong evidence that the Svensmark theory of solar effects on the cosmic ray nucleation of clouds is correct. These errors aside, his plots of cloud cover versus solar radiation are extremely useful.

The data generally shown on cloud cover for the entire globe seems to provide a difficult to interpret effect, but one that implies there is no simple correlation between solar radiation and cloud cover.

The data for the entire globe, with the solar insolation given in blue [the units are W/m2, not kWh/m2] and the percentage of cloud cover averaged from 2000 to 2014 given in red, is:

Note that solar irradiance is actually greatest in the winter, with January being the month of maximum irradiance. This is because the Earth's orbit is elliptical and the Earth is closest to the sun on about 3 January (orbital perihelion) and furthest on about 4 July (orbital aphelion). If the Earth's axis of daily rotation were parallel to the axis of its orbit about the sun, January would be summer for the entire Earth. But in January, the axis of the daily rotation of the Earth in the Northern Hemisphere is tilted to point away from the sun. This reduces the fraction of the total Earth-incident solar radiation which is incident on the Northern Hemisphere. Because the tilt of the Earth's axis of daily rotation has such a large effect, it should be interesting to plot the cloud cover versus solar insolation data for each hemisphere separately. This is just what Magnus Cederlof did. The data for the Northern Hemisphere [correcting the radiation units to W/m2] is:

The greater the solar irradiance of the Northern Hemisphere in the plot above, the greater the cloud cover.

The data plotted by Magnus Cederlof for the Southern Hemisphere correcting the irradiance units to W/m2]:

It is now clear that as the Earth warms in either hemisphere, there is a reaction by water to that warming to cause an increase in hemispherical cloud cover.

Magnus Cederlof then correctly makes the critical point that one feedback response of water to an increase in Earth temperature is an increase in cloud cover, which cools the surface. Thus, increased temperature is counteracted by a negative feedback by clouds and not the positive feedback proclaimed with great certainty by the falsely claimed "settled science of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming."

So there we have it. When the Earth's surface temperature rises, water causes three powerful negative feedbacks to reduce that temperature rise. These are:

Cooling by the evaporation of water, which increases water vapor in the atmosphere.

Increased water vapor reduces the lapse rate in the troposphere, dropping temperatures in the lower atmosphere.

In conclusion, as I have shown over and over, the warming effects of carbon dioxide were always exaggerated hugely. The cooling effects of carbon dioxide have been ignored, though those are now the dominant effects. Even if one bought the argument made by the UN IPCC, the greatly exaggerated warming effect of carbon dioxide had to be supplemented by a much larger claimed warming feedback by water vapor to be even remotely scary. Much of that claim has been well-known to be false for a long time and now we see very clearly that each of the principal effects of water in response to any surface temperature increase is a cooling effect. Water is a powerful stabilizer for the surface temperature of the Earth. It moderates night to day variations, seasonal variations, solar irradiance variations, and would moderate any hypothetical temperature increase caused by atmospheric CO2.

It is mind-boggling that the U.S. government has spent about $100 billion on climate and climate effect research and development in the name of such incredibly wrongheaded science. The United Nations and most of the European nations have also acted on this "science" house of cards in a similar manner. The cost of doing business and the cost of living for hundreds of millions have been sadly boosted in the name of this nonsense. Millions of people have either lost their jobs or were prevented from getting the jobs that might have been created. Terrible wrongs and harms have been perpetrated on billions of human beings both by preventing them from enjoying their individual freedoms and by decreasing their material living conditions. The benefits to humans throughout the world that would have accrued had millions of people used their time more productively and had capital been more rationally invested have been trashed. Instead, governments enjoyed exercising more power over individuals. Dishonest politicians, some dishonest businessmen, and some dishonest scientists enriched themselves by taking advantage of this baseless scare. The vast majority of mankind has nothing to show for it but losses.

21 August 2015

Robert Tracinski, who is usually a very astute thinker, has written on this subject in the Federalist. This is a case where I believe he has used too broad a brush in making his argument in favor of the idea that literally anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. One may say it is a classic case of failing to understand context.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the
State wherein they reside." 14th Amendment

First, in the present
context of massive illegal immigration, it appears that the US and the
states are not acting as though they have jurisdiction over the illegal
immigrants. So the idea that this statement implies that every person
born in the US is a citizen may be questioned on this basis. It is
certainly true that the children of foreign staff of embassies and
consulates born in the US are not included.

More importantly,
Article I, Section 8 provides Congress the power "To establish an
uniform rule of Naturalization...". This means that the 14th Amendment
has as its context an established uniform rule of Naturalization and
assumes that all persons within the US are there legally, albeit some as
visitors and some as residents not yet citizens. This being the case,
the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on the children of those legally
in the United States who are born in the US, provided their parents and
the child are subject to the jurisdiction of the US. This certainly
included the one-time slaves of the south, almost all immigrants until
relatively recent times, and the people of the conquered or annexed
territories such as those of Alaska, Hawaii, the Mexican War, the Oregon
Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, the Western Reserve, etc. Robert Tracinski says that the denial of citizenship to the children of illegal aliens implies its denial to both the former slaves and to all immigrants. This is not the case at all.

What
is not at all clear is that the children of illegal visitors or
immigrants to the US should be considered citizens of the US. In my opinion, it is not wise policy to grant them automatic citizenship, because it encourages illegal immigration.

Of
course, some will claim that I do not like immigrants because I have
made this point. That is not at all so. I favor a much more welcoming
legal immigration policy than the one we have now in the law. But I do
believe we should have an enforced, liberal immigration policy, which the Constitution implies was needed and desirable.

I have
worked hard to promote the legal immigration or visitation rights of a number of very good
scientists, who are also very good people. I have also observed that
most of our illegal immigrants are in fact hardworking and good people.
There is a need to have such people here under legal conditions, while
we exclude or imprison felons.

All of my ancestors were legal
immigrants of the second half of the 1800s, some of whom were of
nationalities sufficiently discriminated against that they were named as
examples in the immigration law of 1866 as people not to be
discriminated against.

I almost always agree with Robert
Tracinski, but not in this case. It is not at all the case that one is throwing out the Constitution if one does not believe that every child born in the United States is automatically a citizen.

19 August 2015

NASA has a program called Eyes on the Earth that allows one to download a program to examine satellite images and measurements around the world. I decided to examine some month-long results for the AIRS satellite measurements for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The more red the color, the higher the carbon dioxide concentration. Of course one expects to see higher concentrations of CO2 over areas with high populations, much industrial activity, and areas with many coal-fired power plants. At least this is what one expects given the hype that man is causing catastrophic man-made global warming with his use of fossil fuels.

Let us examine how those darned Americans polluted the Earth with their CO2 emissions in the month of March 2015:

Oops, we were outdone by Santa's elves, those very industrious little guys so hard at work using fossil fuel energy to make the gifts for this coming Christmas! Who else could be responsible for this huge outpouring of CO2 in northeastern unsettled Canada, in Greenland, over the Arctic waters, and northernmost Siberia? I thought the elves used magic rather than coal-fired power plants to make toys, but I must have been wrong.

Now we know that those Chinese are smothered in pollution from their huge number of coal-fired power plants, so if the examine the CO2 concentration map over China, we have to see a huge CO2 concentration. Right? So here is the March 2015 CO2 concentration map over Asia:

No, it seems even the Chinese cannot compete with those incredible elves. Iran and Pakistan look to be at least as busy with coal-fired power plants as the Chinese are. Western Russia is also more than competitive.

Well, perhaps I have chosen an odd month. How about December 2014:

OK, now we see that the U.S. midwest and northeast are showing some signs of life. Just not as much life as northern Greenland or parts of the Arctic Ocean, or parts of the northern Pacific Ocean, all of which must have some belching coal-fired power plants we knew nothing about. My how ignorant we must be to have not observed those fired-up energy polluters.

But China must have been a hot spot in December 2014. They were all just taking vacations in March 2015.

Yes, at last. At least the people in northeast China were having some effect with their coal-fired power plants in December 2014. But not much more than those very industrious Iranians and Pakistanis. And look what those fishermen in the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea just north of Australia were doing!

Am I just cherry-picking data? Well let us look at July 2015 then:

OK, now we have it. Those American who live in the coastal states of the southeast are the culprits of all the fabled CO2 pollution! Yes sir, now we can see why people in the Southeast are less interested in fighting man-made global warming than the high concentration of Northeastern Progressive Elitists are. It would be harder for them to change their ways. Even though the population density is less there, at least in July of 2015, they used more fossil fuel and polluted the atmosphere more than other Americans. Now we have the smoking gun!

But even those American rednecks of the Southeast have competition. Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and Siberia were just as active CO2 emitters as those Southeastern Americans. Obviously they are really big fossil fuel energy users.

The 3 months of Dec 2014, Mar 2014, and Jul 2015 were the only individual months I tried. You can choose a range of months and the program will display the results for each month one after the other. I did this for the months from January 2013 to July 2015. The results were fairly random outside the Arctic and near Arctic. The brightest red conditions were always over the Arctic and near Arctic. The brightest green conditions, a lower than average CO2 concentration, were also over the Arctic and near Arctic, though green was less dominant overall than red was.

So, it is rather hard to pin the increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere on man's burning fossil fuels. Sorry, but that claim just is not working. It appears very certain that natural effects are highly dominant and they are not well understood. Scientists who are real scientists should be studying those natural causes of CO2 emission.

12 August 2015

I have shown that the EPA rulings on harm done by mercury from coal fired power plants make no sense at all. There is absolutely no epidemiological evidence of increased mercury sickness or of asthma downwind of major clusters of coal-fired power plants. Indeed, maps of mercury concentrations precipitated from the air show no such correlation with coal-fired power plants. The EPA also cherry-picks studies of the health effects of mercury from fish on some islanders, while ignoring other studies of other islanders which show no mercury effects. They then extrapolate from the cherry-picked exaggerated effect to predict an effect at levels microscopic to the natural mercury levels found in many areas of the United States. The reckless ruling against coal-fired power plants based on the mercury argument is incompetent and highly unethical.

The EPA has also claimed that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, even though it is necessary to plant growth and humans exhale it. The EPA falsely claims increased CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming. On the basis of this foolish claim, it is putting out a Clean Power Plan which will require the closing of many coal-fired power plants and some gas-fired power plants and the very inefficient use of many of the remaining gas-fired power plants. The use of a global warming model with hugely exaggerated warming effects says that the new, highly disruptive and expensive ruling will lower temperatures by 0.02 Kelvin, even as vast new coal-fired power plants will produce far more CO2 than the U.S. reduction. Wind and solar energy are to be greatly increased to replace them on the electric grid. Yet wind and solar energy are very expensive and very unreliable. Once again the EPA is mired in incompetence and arrogantly insists on doing great harm to energy users, investors, and workers.

Recently, the EPA demonstrated its incompetence and its unethical behavior by dramatically releasing incredible amounts of gold mining waste water laden with lead, cadmium, and arsenic into the Animas River of the San Juan River Basin. This water flows into the Colorado River and Lake Powell. The EPA was slow in announcing the disaster and will not take the level of responsibility it expects of businesses that it goes after vigorously when they have such disasters. This is the government and the government is never guilty of immoral activity. Just ask the government if you do not believe this.

There is always a double standard for business relative to government. The standards to which businesses are held are much, much higher.

03 August 2015

When discussing the impact of the current New York state minimum wage of $9.00/hour and the law requiring that the minimum wage for fast food workers will rise in stages to $15/hour, I discovered how surprisingly bad off compared to the national household median income most New York residents were. Because I have family in Oklahoma and it is considered to be backward, poor, and only worth flying over by New York Progressive Elitists, I have decided to do a comparable comparison of Oklahoma to New York. After all, Oklahoma is the home of many poor Native Americans and a land of people who should have fled the dust bowl in the 1930s in abject poverty, right? This should be an easy contest for New York.

So once again I will find the cost of living in Oklahoma cities and towns and use that to adjust the median household income of each city or town. This recognizes that income goes much further when the cost of living is low than when it is very high, as tends to happen in areas with a big government mentality. Or at least this happens until the costs cause so many business failures that housing values collapse as people flee the area for jobs in areas with more limited government.

Now the total population of the state of Oklahoma is about 0.2 times that of New York state. So, the size of the cities and towns in this list will be smaller. I chose all of the bigger cities and towns and a few to represent low population areas of the state. The results in the table below for Oklahoma should be compared to those for New York in my previous post.

City or Town

Cost of Living % Compared to National
Average

Median Household Income (National =
$53,046)

Effective Median Household Income

% National Effective Median Household
Income

Broken Arrow

93

$64,411

$69,259

131

Edmond

109

$71,216

$65,336

123

Woodward

82

$51,811

$63,184

119

Bartlesville

80

$48,036

$60,045

113

Guymon

81

$47,775

$58,981

111

Norman

88

$48,248

$54,827

103

Clinton

79

$43,216

$54,704

103

Ponca City

78

$40,434

$51,838

98

Oklahoma City

80

$45,704

$51,353

97

Altus

80

$40,429

$50,536

95

Ardmore

77

$38,383

$49,848

94

Enid

84

$41,515

$49,422

93

Lawton

89

$43,953

$49,385

93

McAlester

81

$39,291

$48,507

91

Tulsa

85

$40,781

$47,978

90

Durant

80

$36,863

$46,079

87

Cushing

78

$35,553

$45,581

86

Muskogee

79

$32,621

$41,292

78

Vinita

78

$32,109

$41,165

78

Okmulgee

79

$32,022

$40,534

76

Sallisaw

82

$29,524

$36,005

68

Stillwater

91

$31,243

$34,333

65

Hugo

76

$21,639

$28,472

54

Whereas, the residents of New York City had effective median household incomes of only 80% of the national average and those of Buffalo had such incomes of only 78% of the national average, most of the residents of Oklahoma have higher incomes. Most of the population in Oklahoma enjoys median effective household incomes which are 90% or more of the national average. For most Oklahomans, the cost of living is below 90% of the national average.

Only three towns were found with effective median household incomes below 76% of the national average. One of these, Hugo, has a population of only 5,325 and is in the table only to represent the low population southeast area of the state. Its effective median household income is better than that of larger Ithaca, NY, population 30,016 and home of Cornell University. Another, Sallisaw, has only 8,779 residents, of whom most are Native Americans. Stillwater, home of Oklahoma State University, has a population of 45,584. None of the other towns are worse off than Buffalo.

The biggest city in the state, Oklahoma City, has an effective median household income of 97% of the national median. The other colossus in the state is Tulsa with an effective median household income of 90% of the national median. The third largest city, Norman, home of the University of Oklahoma, has an effective median household income of 103% the national value. Broken Arrow, number 4 in size, is at 131%, #5 Lawton is 93%, and #6 Edmond is at 123% of the national median household income. There is no contest between Oklahoma and New York.

The Progressive Elitists of New York are famous for telling the rest of the country how to manage the finances of the country and about how concerned they are about income inequality. They assure us that the big government model is best for reducing income inequality and will generally make most people better off. Now, there are many very wealthy and high income people in New York. But the median household income tells us that income point at which half the households make more and half make less. Thus there can be a minority of people who are have very high incomes who do little to shift the median income level up when most households are making far less than they are. New York state is famous for its income inequality in fact. Not withstanding the preaching of its controlling Progressive Elitists.

The minimum wage in Oklahoma is the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour. According to the advice now being given to us by many Progressive Elitists, it should be $15/hour. They claim this would give so many more purchasing power that they would spend their local economies to a condition in which everyone would have higher incomes. But, the people of Oklahoma have managed to do far better than New Yorkers for the most part by ignoring this advice. They have also ignored advice on the advantages of big government to a considerable degree. It appears that the experiment has been done here. The people who inherited the land of the dust bowl and a large Native American population are better off economically than New Yorkers, who have the national financial and business center of the nation.

There is far less income inequality in Oklahoma than in New York. Most households have higher effective median incomes. Wow! The people of fly-over country are beating the pants off of those New Yorkers guided by the all-knowing Progressive Elitists. Now who would have thought that Okies could win this contest so handily?

So, hi Mom, Betsy, Scott, Peggy, and my nieces and nephews in Oklahoma. Congratulations on beating those New Yorkers economically and for not following their advice on matters of politics. It is a very good idea to keep the cost of living low and the cost of doing business low by keeping government smaller. Keep on trucking! Keep electing those smaller government Republicans and leave those Big Government Democrats to the New Yorkers, who are killing themselves.

Ayn Rand on Morality

"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."

Anthem by Ayn Rand

"For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on. Man, not men."

James Madison

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people, by gradual and silent ancroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations: but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism."

General George S. Patton

"If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking."

H. L. Mencken

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face to rule it."

George Orwell

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

H. L. Mencken

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."

Thomas H. Huxley

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin."

Thomas Jefferson on Democracy

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

Henry Ford

"Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work."

Thomas Jefferson on Truth

"Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

Niccolo Machiavelli

"One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived."

Sherlock Holmes

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle if you prefer.

Mary McCarthy

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

Sen. Tim Wirth, Democrat, Colorado

"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing."

Bismarck

"Fools learn by experience, the wise man learns by the experience of others."

Albert Einstein

As Albert Einstein once said about the book "One Hundred Authors Against Einstein": “Why one hundred? If I were wrong, one would be enough.”

Governments are Never Sovereign

Only individuals are sovereign. Governments are either legitimate or illegitimate. They are legitimate only to the extent that they protect the exercise of every individual's right to life; liberty; the ownership of their own mind, body, and labor; their property; their freedom of conscience and association, and the pursuit of their own happiness. No government on Earth is highly legitimate. Most are highly illegitimate.

So sayeth Charles R. Anderson.

Dr. Thomas Sowell is Retiring

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."

"The real minimum wage is zero."

"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best."

"People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do."

"The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses, it is about the egos of the elites."

"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."

Prof. Walter E. Williams on Democracy

"... one of the primary dangers of majority rule is that it confers an aura of legitimacy and respectability to acts that would otherwise be deemed tyrannical."

Ayn Rand on Minorities

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

Hillary Clinton on Job Creation

"Don't let anybody tell you that, you know, its corporations and businesses that create jobs."

Socialists never want anyone to credit individuals with a productive purpose as the source of their jobs. When the government piles on such heavy taxes and regulations as to prevent job formation, they are always trying to misdirect the people's attention. Hillary has been vigorous in promising more taxes and more major regulations which will make the Obama record of 0.5% annual increases in real per capita GDP look good in comparison.

Frederic Bastiat

"It's impossible to introduce into society a greater evil than this, the conversion of Law into an instrument of PLUNDER."

Ayn Rand

"The number of its adherents is irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of an idea. A majority is as fallible as a minority or as an individual man. A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea." ... "it is important to note the epistemological significance of a free society. In a free society, the pursuit of truth is protected by the free access of any individual to any field of endeavor he may choose to enter." ... "This prevents the formation of any coercive "elite" in any profession -- it prevents the legalized enforcement of a "monopoly on truth" by any gang of power seekers -- it protects the free market place of ideas -- it keeps all doors open to man's inquiring mind."

The catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is no exception to these general truths about the right of every individual to examine and evaluate any idea.

Do Not Subordinate Your Mind to the Mind of Another

The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

John Galt in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

UN Agenda 21, Principle 15

"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."

The real operating principle: Neither shall total lack of scientific certainty delay taking action with catastrophic economic effects if one can imagine some environmental degradation.

Dr. Thomas Sowell

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today."

"What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture -- and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture."

"It is so easy to be wrong -- and to persist in being wrong -- when the costs of being wrong are paid by others."

"Intellectuals have trouble remembering that they are not God."

Saul Alinsky

"To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life."

It is good to understand what the nihilists think, especially since such politicians as Obama and Hillary admire this man and use his principles for damaging the private sector and Capitalism.

Ronald Reagan

"If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

A democratic society that needs a much-controlling government to manage the affairs of its People has a People so lacking in character and ability that there is no hope the People can democratically elect leaders of good character and adequate capability. That society is doomed by a self-contradiction. The escape from doom is the development in the People of such character and ability that they shun a much-controlling government.

Aesop

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment

"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony.... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."

What a sad thing is attempted justice without truth.

Aldous Huxley

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

Ayn Rand

"'There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden,' Francisco said softly, 'except one: the refusal to think.'"

Francisco D'Anconia to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged

Frederic Bastiat on the Law

"It has been used to destroy its own objective. It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.”

Louis L'Amour in High Lonesome

"Folks talk a lot about the maternal feeling in women, but they say nothing about man's need to protect and care for someone; yet the one feeling is as basic as the other."

"Nor were they free of the images their own minds held of themselves. The man on horseback, the lone-riding man, the lone-thinking man, possessed an image of himself that was in part his own, in part a piece of all the dime novels he had read, for no man is free of the image his literature imposes on him. And the dime novel made the western hero a knight-errant, a man on horseback rescuing the weak and helpless."

Dr. Thomas Sowell

"Today one can literally go from kindergarten to becoming a graduate student seeking a Ph.D., without ever hearing a vision of the world that conflicts with the vision of the left."

"Even liberal professors can be adversely affected by the narrow groupthink that prevails. Without an opposition to keep them on their toes, they can develop sloppy habits of dismissing or even demonizing differing viewpoints, instead of practicing and teaching their students how to come to grips with opposing beliefs."

From Dry Rot in Academia

John Stuart Mill

"In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character was abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

Josepth Stalin

"We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?"

Robert Tracinski

"The way we view the naked human body reflects our view of human nature itself. We portray our bodies in ways that are crude or refined depending on whether we view our souls as crude or refined. And we do the same with the sensuality and the sexual capacity of our bodies. We can view sex and the nude body as a dangerous temptation that draws us away from higher ideals and down into the muck—or we can make it part of those higher ideals. We can make it an expression of a wider lust for life, an expression of the same spirit of aspiration that drives all of our other achievements."

The Three Graces by Antonio Canova

David by Michelangelo

Frederic Bastiat

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

"But how is this legal plunder to be to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

Ayn Rand on Excellence

"If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."

Ayn Rand

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see."

Patrick Henry

"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

H. L. Mencken

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Catastrophic man-made global warming is a great example of such alarmism to justify more power for the politicians and bureaucrats.

Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add, `within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrants will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."

Ayn Rand

"Serenity comes from the ability to say 'Yes' to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say 'No' to the wrong choices made by others."

Galileo Galilei

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."

Henry Ford

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

Samuel Adams

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks."

The Constitution itself remains a strong defense of our individual rights, but those who want power over our lives have long claimed ridiculous interpretations of the powers it grants to the federal government which they have cemented in irrational precedents. Time after time, the fact that our individual rights are broad and must allow each of us to manage our own lives while we pursue our own chosen values, so long as we do not violate the equal rights of others, is a context ignored.

Thomas Jefferson, 1816

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

When the government controls the education system, you can be sure the education system will guarantee the ignorance of the people so they may be ruled without the impediment of the people demanding their individual rights.

John C. Goodman

"Closing Off Consumption Opportunities. Just as low-income individuals in their role as producers are increasing[ly] regulated out of income earning opportunities, in their role as consumers they are increasingly regulated out of the market for essential services. In addition to education and housing, they have been regulated out of the market for medical care, transportation and even police protection. For all these essential services, the wealthy turn to the private marketplace. They even employ police officers as off-duty, private guards for their gated communities. The poor are left with public housing, public schools, public transportation, government-provided health care, etc.

The well-off get all the benefits of capitalism. The poor are left with socialism."

Averroes

"An army of philosophers would not be sufficient to change the nature of error and to make it truth."

An army of scientist mercenaries at the service of All-Controlling Government is not sufficient to make the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis true either.

Ayn Rand on the Creative Man

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."

Lawrence W. Reed

"It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions."

Patrick Henry

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government lest it come to dominate our lives and our interests."

Prof. Walter E. Williams

"That initial premise is that each of us owns himself. Stated another way: I am my private property and you are yours. The institution of private property is the right held by the owner of property to keep, acquire, dispose, and exclude from use. The premise of self-ownership determines which human acts are moral or immoral and consistent with that premise. For example, rape, murder, slavery, fraud, and theft are immoral because they violate private property."

Thomas Jefferson

The "sum of good government" is one "which shall restrain men from injuring one another" and "shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement."

The presumption is maximum liberty limited not by the welfare of others, but only by the injunction to do no harm to others.

H. L. Mencken

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

Madison Versus Hitler

"(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." James Madison

"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so." Adolf Hitler

Frederic Bastiat

"The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education."

Mark Twain

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

This certainly applies to those who believe in the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists, minimum wage laws, ObamaCare, the ethanol in gasoline mandate, and tying solar and wind power in high percentages to the electric grid.

Prof. Walter E. Williams on White Privilege

"The concept of white privilege, along with diversity and multiculturalism, is part of today's campus craze. .....

The bottom line to this campus nonsense is that "privilege" has become the new word for "personal achievement." ....

Are those who work hard, take risks, make life better for others and become wealthy in the process the people who should be held up to ridicule and scorn? And should we make mascots out of social parasites?"

Albert Einstein

"A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."

Prof. John Christy, Climate Scientist

“If it’s not economically sustainable, it’s not sustainable.”

Ayn Rand on Human Progress

"Man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress."

George Orwell

"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it."

Abbot of Arbroath, Chancellor of Robert the Bruce

"For so long as one hundred of us shall remain alive we shall never in any wise consent to submit to the rule of the English. For it is not for glory we fight, for riches, or for honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life." April 1320, Six years after the Battle of Bannockburn

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free."

If one is told " 'it is expedient for the state that you should die,' he should die."

From The Social Contract, a most emphatic statement of authoritarian collectivism by a profound misanthropist.

Patrick Henry

"The Constitution is NOT an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the PEOPLE to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interest."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."

Alexander Hamilton

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government."

Milton Friedman

“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

John Quincy Adams

"Muhammad declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind... The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Muhammad is the prophet of God."

Justice Robert H. Jackson

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

This applies to the government-run education system, as well as every other act of government, including its procurements.

Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead

"Don't bother to examine a folly, ask only what it accomplishes."

Ayn Rand's villain giving us insight into the beliefs of the Progressive Elitists and others with beliefs too divorced from reality to be creditable, yet widely believed or propagated.

Thomas Jefferson

"let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."

Of course this belief implies those great constraints on democracy imposed by the Constitution.

About Me

I enjoy rational analytical conversations, learning from thinking people, and solving problems of science and technology. My perspective is that of an Objectivist with a joyous sense of life, a great appreciation for human complexity, differentiation, and achievement, and a benevolent regard for others. Nothing clarifies understanding like writing about it or trying to teach ideas. A recurring theme is the importance of individuality and the fight for individual rights against the onslaught of the Nanny State and socialism. I wish to live the life of a rational self-managing adult and am amazed that so many others wish to be perpetual children. The fear, envy, and guilt that cause many to yield their individual rights to collectivism are ugly, anti-life emotions. I consistently believe in both the personal and the economic rights of the sovereign individual. As the United States Declaration of Independence says, each of us has the selfish right to our life, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness. Our mostly ignored Constitution attempts to severely limit the powers of the federal government and to preserve the development and the exercise of our individual conscience.

Robert Tracinski

"The real minimum wage is zero. Actually, it’s less than zero: the real “minimum wage” is going into debt just to have a shot at doing the work you love."

I went hugely into debt to set up my materials analysis laboratory and paid myself only $10,000 in the first year and even less in the Obama Recession years of 2010 - 2012.

Obama

“When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.” 2015 State of the Union Address

So, we should ditch Big Government, government health care, The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, Social Security, the Federal Reserve, government-run education, the Davis-Bacon Act, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (the Jones Act), and all expansionist interpretations of the Interstate Commerce and the Taxation Clauses of the Constitution upon this Obama Principle of Failure.

Louis L'Amour

"when in doubt, sit down and think. It is only the mind of man that has lifted him above the animals." Evie's Dad

"If he starts anything with me I'll just cloud up and rain all over him." Conagher

"You better ride out of here, Staples. An' leave that gun alone. You ain't fit to handle one. And don't you cross my trail again. I don't like bein' braced by no tin-horn." Conagher

"To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed." Conagher

"it was the man who planted a tree, dug a well, or graded a road who mattered."

"Conagher had worked too hard too many times to like a thief or a vandal who would steal or destroy the efforts of other men."

Big Bill Knudsen on Progress

"Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity. If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear."

William S. Knudsen

Elbert Hubbard

"Prison is a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated."

Charles R. Anderson

"Every law mandates more guns. Most laws now outlaw individual value choices and more voluntary cooperation among individuals."

Bad Deeds by Robert Bidinotto

2nd Great Thriller about Bringing Justice to Eco Terrorists -- Nominated for Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Book of the Year 2014

Charles Anderson on Hope

".... hope is contingent upon having the freedom to make your own value choices and make their achievement your personal dream. Without the dream, there is no hope. Without the value choice, there is no dream."

A Collapsing Predation, a Plea for Salvation

"These are just plain, ordinary people, Mr. Galt, " said Chick Morrison in a tone intended to project their abject humility. "They can't tell you what to do. They wouldn't know. They're merely begging you. They may be weak, helpless, blind, ignorant. But you, who are so intelligent and strong, can't you take pity on them? Can't you help them?" "By dropping my intelligence and following their blindness?" "They may be wrong, but they don't know any better!" "But I, who do, should obey them?"

From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Sen. Tom Coburn Addressing the Senate

"Your whole goal is to protect the United States of America, its Constitution and its liberties. It's not to provide benefits for your state. That's where we differ -- that's where my conflict with my colleagues has come. It's nice to be able to do things for your state, but that isn't our charge. Our charge is to protect the future of our country by upholding the Constitution." December 2014

James Madison on Laws

"It will be of little avail to the people ... if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."

Yet this is exactly the sorry state of law in America today. Even the legislators whose full-time job is to make laws cannot read them before voting on them. How can it even be imagined that a small businessman can know the law and the voluminous regulations applied most especially and most vigorously to commercial endeavors? It cannot be so imagined, which makes it clear that the intent is to make every businessman a criminal precariously dependent upon the goodwill of those with power in the government.

Charles R. Anderson on Argument

"Observe which side resorts to the most vociferous name-calling and you are likely to have identified the side with the weaker argument and they know it."

From my statement in the Senate Minority Report of 2008 on Man-Made Global Warming Claims.

Ben Franklin

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

Ayn Rand on Force and Morality

"Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins." From Atlas Shrugged

The Neverending Battle for Freedom

Requires a Knowledge of Moral and Political Principles

Winston Churchill

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy."

Ludwig von Mises

"A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings."

Ayn Rand on Truth Seeking

"The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it."

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.

Charles in Laboratory

Benno Schmidt, President of Yale, March 1991

"The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses ... The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind."

Tacitus, 56 - 120 A.D.

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. "

The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.

George Eliot

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular -- but one must take it because it's right."

Is that not all times?

Public Servant Tyrants

"The people must remain ever vigilant against tyrants masquerading as public servants." George Washington

Aristotle on Inequality

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal."

Claiming unequal things equal in mathematics is obviously wrong, but so is claiming the equality of an individual with good character to an individual of bad character fraught with deleterious consequences.

Mencken on Public Education

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." Henry Louis Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Thomas Edison

"From his neck down, a man is worth a couple of dollars a day; from his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can invent."

Ayn Rand on Self-Assurance

"But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself." From The Fountainhead

Frederick Douglass

“A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.”

William S. Knudsen

"A conference is a gathering of guys that singly can do nothing and together decide nothing can be done."

Big Bill Knudsen was the manufacturing genius from the automotive industry who decided that U.S. WWII warfare production should be performed in the private sector with as little government interference as possible. U.S. production overwhelmed that of the Axis Powers as a result and the transition back to peace-time production was vastly eased. He is a little-recognized American Hero.

Margaret Thatcher

"Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy."

Pajama Boy for ObamaCare

I'll be an adult when I am 26. I have no job and live with Mommy. I will get a big subsidy when I go on ObamaCare. Good thing, because medical insurance costs for young men in my state are 2 to 3 times what they used to be. If my gender studies degree ever gets me a job, medical insurance will cost me a fortune. I'd rather just sit at home drinking hot chocolate and have Mommy feed me and do my laundry.

Ayn Rand on Lack of Self-Direction

"The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap." From The Fountainhead

Bastiat on Socialism

"Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism." Frederic Bastiat, 1801-1850

James Madison

Property is "every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage."

"He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them."

"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."

"That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property so called."

"If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property: which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, ... such a government is not a pattern for the United States."

[Yet such a property violating government we now have.]

Obama According to Ron Pisaturo

"My opponents don’t have a plan for the economy, for education, for training, for retirement, for health care, for energy, for jobs, for wages, for investments, for diets. What kind of dictators are they?"

Ron Pisaturo's paraphrase of Obama's State of the Union Address in January 2014.

Starve the Kleptocracy and Tyranny

and Promote the General Welfare by Protecting Individual Rights

John Galt on the Battle

John Galt says in Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:

Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

Groucho Marx

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."

Charles in Pensacola, FL

Boy with a Purpose

Andrew Jackson

"Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society -- the farmers, mechanics, and laborers -- who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government .... If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, [government] would be an unqualified blessing."

Jay Leno

"The White House admitted President Obama’s chief of staff had advance warning that the IRS was targeting conservative groups. President Obama says the first time he heard about the IRS and AP scandals was from the media. See, that’s why President Obama holds press conferences. It’s not to explain what’s going on. It’s to find out what’s going on."

Government is too big to be well-managed even by a competent manager. It is now apparent what happens when the chief executive is incompetent, but is convinced he is the chief Progressive Elitist.

Thomas Jefferson

"The democracy will cease when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."

James I, King of Great Britain

"The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth, for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called gods."

There is historical precedent for the level of hubris of the Progressive Elitist rulers of our time. Just as James I tried to rule independently of Parliament with a claim of god-like knowledge, so does Obama rule independently of our Congress, secure in the belief that he too has a god-like knowledge of what is best for the People.

2nd Amendment Right

Calvin Coolidge

Reduced top income tax rate to 25%.Reduced the national debt.Balanced and reduced the budget.Vetoed 50 bills.

"I am for economy, and after that I am for more economy.”

“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”

A Novel by Gen LaGreca

A Dream of Daring - A thickly plotted romantic novel

Jean Jacques Burlamaqui

"Natural liberty is the right, which nature gives to all mankind, of disposing of their persons and property, after the manner they judge most convenient to their happiness, on condition of their acting within the limits of the law of nature, and their not abusing it to the prejudice of their fellow men. To this right of liberty there is a reciprocal obligation corresponding, by which the law of nature binds all mankind to respect the liberty of other men, and not to disturb them in the use they make of it, so long as they do not abuse it."

Kail M. Padgitt, of the Tax Foundation produced the 2011 State Business Tax Climate Index in October. The report evaluates the effects of...

Pamela Geller

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad

Roger Scruton, 2006

The English law existed not to control the individual but to free him.

Laurence J. Peter

Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.

Ben Franklin - 2nd Amendment

"Democracy... Is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty... Is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

This is why every individual has the right to defend himself, as recognized in the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

John Milton

"Where there is much desire to learn, here of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making."

Cato's Letters

"the power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his own Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys."

They Would Rule the People

Rather than Serve the People

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

More Important than Ever

Atlas Shrugged, Part II

The Movie, Either-Or, Now on DVD

Democracy -- The Suicide

"Remember democracy never lasts long. It soonwastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." John Adams, letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814

Thomas Jefferson

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Praise the Constitution

and Pass the Intellectual Ammunition

Ayn Rand: Philosophical Detection

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an "open mind", but an active mind -- a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants -- a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.

If you keep an active mind, you will discover (assuming that you started with common-sense rationality) that every challenge you examine will strengthen your convictions, that the conscious, reasoned rejection of false theories will help you to clarify and amplify the true ones, that your ideological enemies will make you invulnerable by providing countless demonstrations of their own impotence.

Alan MacFarlane, 1978

The majority of ordinary people in England from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically rational, market-oriented and acquisitive, ego-centered in kinship and social life. Perhaps this is no surprise, for it makes them very like their descendants.

On Error and Judgment by Ayn Rand

An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

Howard Roark at his trial:

"I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need." .....

"I wished to come and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world." ...

"I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society."

Thomas Jefferson

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Despite the fact that NASA scientists are among the foremost promoters of catastrophic global warming due to man's use of fossil fuels a...

California Venus

Rupert Schmid, 1864-1932

George Bernard Shaw

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Paul's immorality is soon characteristic of the entire society, contributing evermore to strife and conflict and the discouragement of productive labor.

Fight Big Government

Reduce Spending

Thomas Paine on Principle

"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."

Limited Government Capitalism

is the only system that allows Individuals to make their own moral choices and to act upon them. Without individual moral choice, there is no morality and society is mean, brutal, envious, and depressing.

The Homage of Reason

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." Thomas Jefferson

Tocqueville

“a man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him”.

First ObamaCare Stole Your Body

Minimum Family Plan = $20,000

In the name of the best within you,

do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, and grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

Immoral Government Health Care

Barack Hussein Obama

Consensus

Consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually"- Abba Eban

Obama's Socialism

Absolutely Childish, Banal Thinking

Rose Robbins - Singer/Songwriter

A Goddess would envy her voice.

Who is John Galt?

From John Galt's Speech to Americans in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:

"I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values."

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act, he must know the nature and purpose of his action."

"But to think is an act of choice." ..... "In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival -- so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be" is the question 'to think or not to think.'

"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible."

"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence -- and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms."

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice -- and the alternative his nature offers is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man -- by choice; he has to hold his life as a value -- by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -- by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues -- by choice."

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man -- for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life."

"Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness -- to value the failure of your values -- is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altar of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man -- every man -- is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose."

Thus said John Galt, or shall we say Ayn Rand, the great novelist, philosopher, moralist, and Capitalism's greatest moral defender. The quoted sections above are an abridgment of John Galt's speech in the novel Atlas Shrugged. Between the quotes, no changes were made.

A Call to the Sons of Liberty

This is not the time for summer soldiers. This is a time of American crisis calling for winter soldiers.

John Paul Jones

I have not yet begun to fight! The image is from the Navy Memorial.

Thomas Jefferson:

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Charles R. Anderson, Ph. D.

The First Known Use of the Concept Freedom

Amagi, or Freedom, in the cuneiform shown above, is first known to have appeared in a clay document in 2300 BC in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

The Rational Mind Seeks Truth

in the critical observation and understanding of reality. Reality is primary, not man's wishes and whims.